Gambling & Pigeons - Miller (2015)

Argues that animal studies can tell ius about human behaviour.

• University of Kentucky - found that pigeons and problem gamblers have a particular trait in common.  Impulsive behaviour.
• Training in impulsive control could help.
• In experiments that trained pigeons to choose to peck keys for food, the birds placed high-stake bets.  Consistently pecking a key that would give them a big jackpot - 10 pieces of food - but that only paid out 20% of the time, rather than a key with a modest pay off of 3 pieces of food which paid out 100% of the time.
• Could this be related to impulsivity?  They added anothe procedure to find out.
• Time honoured test for impulsivity looks at ability to delay gratification - if a gambler or pigeon could have a small reward now or a heftier payout later, which would they choose?  Less time they're willing to wait for the large prize, the more impulsive they are.
• Using the "delayed reward" task they found that the more impulsive birds - who were more partial to pecking keys that gave them a little food immediately, instead of a large number of pellets for which they'd have to wait up to 20 secs - were more likely to choose the gambling like altnerative associated with the jackpot than the sure thing.

• Same phenomenon seen in problem gambling, clinically recognised as impulsive control disorder.  Gamblers are unaffected by losses and attend almost exclusively to their seldom occurring gains.
• Results suggest that impulsivity may make a person more prone to having gambling problems, this might have clinical implications since training in impulse control might help reduce problem gambling.